ReSounding the Lost Apple: Operation Pedro Pan and Communicating Grief through Musical Performance

Abstract From December 1960 to October 1962, over 14,000 unaccompanied Cuban minors arrived in the United States as part of a covert airlift known as Operation Pedro Pan (OPP). Like most Cold War initiatives, OPP became entrenched in polarizing political rhetoric that obscured the lived experiences of the young migrants. Though their visibility in the Cold War’s ideological battle faded over time, the grief many Pedro Pans associate with the simultaneous loss of homeland, family, culture, language, and childhood remains potent. To process this grief, many have turned to the arts to depict their exodus. Performative works commemorating OPP center nostalgic pre-Revolutionary musical genres and artists, as nostalgia remains an important expression of exilic grief and communal belonging for Pedro Pans, their families, and the broader Cuban-American community. In this article, I examine the ways in which Pedro Pan artists mobilize nostalgic musics such as son, danzón, and rumba, to variously express individual grief within collective experience. Drawing on Svetlana Boym’s delineation of “restorative” and “reflective” nostalgias, I note a distinction between “restorative” works that depict a unified, shared utopic past and “reflective” works that underscore loss through the conversion of the familiar to the strange. Through these analyses, I expose divergent ways in which Pedro Pans have both processed and attempted to incite witnessing for their grief through musical performance.